Buenbit Leverages Cross-Channel Messaging to Drive In-App Promotions and Transactions

Buenbit is a cryptocurrency exchange and a cross-border payment platform through which users can buy, sell, and invest cryptocurrency. They are based in Argentina and also cater to the Mexican and Peruvian markets. Buenbit’s app has an intuitive interface and has attracted close to one million users.

The mobile platform supports a variety of crypto currencies, including DAI (known as the digital dollar), BTC, ETH, USDT, BNB, MATIC, DOT, and SOL. Their app also enables users to trade at any time of the day, without added commissions. In addition to their trading functionality, they also offer a digital crypto card, a physical card, and an investment product.

When their app launched in 2018, the Buenbit team knew that multichannel messaging would be critical for a variety of transactional and marketing use cases.

For a crypto exchange like Buenbit, it’s important to connect with users in an immediate, mobile-first way in order to help users invest and trade currencies. They knew they needed to add push notifications to their messaging strategy to drive these quick actions on their exchange.

Prior to finding OneSignal, the only communication channel Buenbit was using was email, which they knew was limiting the potential impact they could have on their customers and was not ideal for driving product adoption. They knew they needed a full suite of messaging capabilities centralized in a single solution in order to leverage both email and in-app messages in addition to push notifications. 

On the technical side, Buenbit also wanted to find a messaging solution that would be easy to implement and would integrate well with their existing tech stack. 

Lucia Ortiz, Growth Specialist on the company’s Marketing team, recalls that their IT team rejected every provider but OneSignal. Buenbit’s technical team was impressed by OneSignal’s seamless implementation process, breadth of integrations, and technical strengths. 

From Ortiz’s perspective as a Growth Specialist, she needed a solution where she could design campaigns based on in-app actions and manage and track message performance across channels. Given that Ortiz would spend much of her time in the platform without technical support, she needed an interface that would allow her to easily differentiate her audiences, design campaigns, and evolve her strategy across channels without needing development support. 

“I am the one leading the engagement team and using OneSignal 90 percent of the day. Once we started using the platform we found it was really easy to use: we could create communications in a few simple steps, find the tags to create different segments, or even set up complex Journeys.”

In this way, their strategy allowed them to both drive users towards the app and fully explain the company's value proposition, as well as to drive traffic to their official social networks and their blog, encouraging users to access educational content.

The OneSignal and Mixpanel integration was a critical piece of Buenbit’s Journeys strategy. Mixpanel is a powerful product analytics platform that Buenbit uses to understand how users are interacting with their app. With the bidirectional integration, they can now correlate notification performance with transactional data.

They track events such as users buying/selling a cryptocurrency, receiving a credit, or activating their new crypto card and can now quantify the impact of notifications on these actions. In addition to tracking open and click-through rates, they also track custom Outcomes metrics.

“[With the integration], I can group all communications regarding a specific campaign in Mixpanel and identify which of these communications had the best performance,” said Ortiz. “It’s something that actually really works.”

On average, more than 30 percent of the transactions made in the app can be tracked directly to OneSignal's communications.

Because Buenbit provides a complex multi-touch user journey where users must take a variety of sequential actions in the platform, they needed ways to reliably re-engage their user base at scale — from prompting users to take multiple security steps, sending time-sensitive reminders to swap currencies, and sharing systematic promotional messages related to product usage and adoption.

In order to meet all different conversion goals, Ortiz embraced OneSignal's Journeys builder tool.

“Journeys was a must for us when we started working with OneSignal. We were really looking forward to it. ”

Buenbit’s onboarding journey serves an important purpose in getting users to verify their accounts. Account verification is critical because it establishes a user’s identity before they open their account, which can prevent future fraud and security breaches. To get users to complete this important step, Buenbit sends alternating push notifications and email messages that communicate the importance of verification and also promote the value of the platform itself.

They’ve found that their users respond best to communications in these two channels compared to a channel such as SMS. Emails not only provide a way to inform users why they’ve requested verification but also give Buenbit the opportunity to communicate their different products.

“Emails allow us to reach more users. Not all of them have push notifications activated at this point.”

Their email and push design reflect their brand colors and their clean and professional brand style.

Buenbit also created a messaging Journey to encourage users to perform coin swaps, which is the main function of a crypto exchange. They created user segments based on what types of currencies their users currently do or don’t hold and personalize their buy and sell recommendations accordingly.

“What we are doing right now actually is looking for different ways to upgrade our users,” explained Ortiz. “We create segments to know if those starting users are holding different types of crypto. Depending on what type of crypto they are holding, the messages we send to them are different.”

For instance, Buenbit uses Journeys to target users who hold only US dollars with if/then branching to send personalized follow-ups. This cohort is of high interest for an upgrade sequence because they don’t yet hold crypto on the platform and aren’t earning interest on their currency.

To encourage these users to buy crypto, Buenbit starts the Journey targeting users they’ve tagged as holding only USD with a series of push notifications that communicate the value of investing in coins.

In their messaging copy, they communicate the benefits of investing their USD in crypto in order to gain daily returns. Users are removed from the messaging Journey when they invest in another currency. 

This notification communicates the benefits of investing in crypto in order to earn daily interest.

For Buenbit, protecting user security and privacy is a central priority. In a platform where a user is moving and withdrawing virtual currency, it’s crucial to have authentication mechanisms in place to protect sensitive information and assets.

To better protect their users, Buenbit created a Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) Journey.

“This Journey is quite interesting because we are creating cohorts and segments in Mixpanel and with this integration, we can send the cohorts from Mixpanel to OneSignal and use it for the Journey.”

They first create user segments in Mixpanel, dividing users into those who have activated 2FA and those who haven’t. From there, they create a messaging workflow consisting of five push notifications sent on a weekly basis to remind users to complete their 2FA setup. Users who complete the process automatically move from one cohort to another and exit the journey.

Buenbit’s push notifications communicate the urgency of users’ proactively protecting their accounts with playful headlines and eye-catching emojis. As the Journey progresses, the notifications provide different reasons why users should complete 2FA.

Many of Buenbit’s Journeys use cases involve driving product adoption, which is integral to the company’s monetization strategy. In order to activate users on their new Crypto card product, they’ve deployed different journeys.

The team was excited to promote their new Crypto Card, with which they can select which crypto to use to make payments and forget about pre-loading the card. Buenbit has gotten creative in executing three different Journeys for their Card products.

Their first sequence aims to get users without any type of card to try the digital card. Their second is targeted at users with the digital card with the goal of getting them to upgrade to the physical card, and the third is focused on getting users who’ve requested the physical card to activate it.

For a recent product launch, Buenbit also used cross-channel messaging — which involves sending users notifications on one or more channels — to promote their new Crypto Loans product, which allows users to withdraw up to 7M nuARS, a stablecoin tied to the Argentinian peso, using DAI as collateral. Users are able to use those nuARS to buy other crypto on Buenbit, withdraw crypto, or spend them using their prepaid card.

To maximize the results of this launch, Ortiz sought to execute a cross-channel messaging campaign to drive participation.

“We started thinking and setting the communications really early in the process.”

To promote this product, they first sent an email, followed by a push two days later.

They then retargeted users who had visited the credit screen but who had not followed through with the desired action with a follow-up email. This retargeted email contains a call-to-action, or CTA, that takes users back to the credit screen in order to complete their purchase.

Two days later, they send an additional retargeted push notification to users who’ve reached the credit screen, but haven’t not completed the action. Throughout this process, they can easily evaluate which messages are converting users.

"We created three different Journeys with a cross channel strategy, having emails, push notifications and even in-app messages triggered on different screens on the app, to encourage users to get a loan instead of using their cryptocurrencies. In the 1st month after we launched this product, 54 percent of the total loans taken, came from this communication.", Ortiz said.

After familiarizing users with the benefits of nuARS, they can now transfer their salaries to Buenbit and invest in this token, which allows them to see returns of up to 70 percent per year.

Looking ahead, Buenbit is excited about OneSignal’s inclusion of in-app messages in Journeys. They love being able to show an in app message if the user previously opened or clicked on an email or push.

“This is game changer. To be able to integrate the in-apps to the journey would be really great, especially when launching a new product. Using a cross-channel communication strategy is fundamental.“